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'Reign of terror': What's lost to violence in a once-gentle Syracuse neighborhood

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Investigator Dan Fahey of the Onondaga County Sheriff's Office, in front of the Knaul Street house owned by his family from the 1880s into the 1990s: A beloved neighborhood, overwhelmed by violence.
(Mike Greenlar | mgreenlar@syracuse.com)

Investigator Dan Fahey offers a quick lesson from the North Side of Syracuse. If you grew up there, Fahey said, you realize the "K" in Knaul Street is not silent. It's "Kuh-naul Street," said Fahey, who's heard it mispronounced many times in recent days -- although he wishes there was no need to be pronouncing it at all.

Knaul Street is bordered on one end by Butternut Street and on the other by a stairway to Schiller Park. Fahey, of the Onondaga County Sheriff's Office, has memories from the 1960s of that area as a close and vibrant slice of city fabric.

Yet he is pained by the 21st century reality: In the past week, two people were shot to death in front of a small house on 107 Knaul, evidence of a wounded neighborhood out of control.

Monday, a police car idled in the street, while a pit bull barked at strangers from a neighbor's upstairs window. Investigators had crime-scene tape wrapped around Cole's memorial: Stuffed animals, flowers and liquor bottles were piled by a simple wooden cross, while candles burned near the porch of 109 Knaul, a home separated by only a few feet from 107.

If you stepped back from the broken glass, if you looked at the ornamental railings and the outline of what had once been gardens, you realized those small houses - at some point - must have been beloved by their owners.

Fahey, 52, offers proof. He spent the first years of his life at 109 Knaul.

"It's extremely difficult," he said Monday, "to see what's happened."

While Fahey is not working on the police investigation, he often drives to the area simply to reflect. He moved away from the street decades ago. Still, like many Americans born just after World War II, his heritage isn't rooted in some faraway "Old Country." It begins instead with the city neighborhood where he grew up, a place whose streets intertwine with his sense of family.

The suffering on Knaul leaves him pondering the difficult riddle of the city: The only way to remedy the violence is to somehow restore the sense of community the bloodshed relentlessly destroys.

Fahey said his great-grandfather moved in the 1880s to 109 Knaul. His grandmother, Margaret Fahey, spent her life in the house. The investigator's father, Kenneth Fahey, was a Korean War veteran who grew up on Knaul Street, and Kenneth and his wife were staying there when Dan and his brother Doug were born.

A message left by vandals on a boarded-up Knaul Street home, a few houses away from the scene of two recent homicides.Mike Greenlar | mgreenlar@syracuse.com

A few years later, Dan's parents moved to a new home on the North Side. The two boys would routinely jump on their bicycles for the quick ride to their grandmother's on Knaul Street.

"I spent a lot of time in my childhood working on that house, repairing the screens or sealing the driveway, and to see it the way it is now just makes me sick," Fahey said.

He can tell you about the corner stores on Butternut where he'd buy baseball cards or ice cream bars. He remembers how his grandmother often walked to her job at the downtown Wells and Coverly department store, and how no one ever worried about her safety.

Fahey also has warm memories of the neighbors, John and Angie Netti, who lived at 107 Knaul from the 1950s into the 1990s. They've both died, but two of their grown children -- John Netti and Adele Cutrone - said the killings in the front yard of their old house sent sorrow through the family, now scattered throughout the region.

The Netti siblings recalled their early years as joyous, even though their parents never had much money. "There were times we had hot dogs and beans for dinner," said Cutrone, but that was hardly unusual for working families in the neighborhood.

Their dad, a World War II veteran, had strong carpentry skills. He remade the attic into bedroom space for his three boys. The Nettis made good use of a vegetable garden. And Cutrone recalled how the children would hold carnivals in the back yard to raise money for muscular dystrophy.

A half-century later, the same yard - filled now with debris - may have provided cover for the gunman who shot Paul to death.

Drive along Knaul Street, and you'll see how someone scrawled "reign of terror" on the front of a boarded-up house. That kind of desecration, Fahey said, is linked to a breakdown of the quiet stability and security he enjoyed as a boy.

"Families had been there for years and years, and you knew every single person in the neighborhood," he said. Elderly homeowners would sweep "every leaf on the sidewalk,"
Fahey said, and residents saw some expression of themselves in the appearance of their houses.

Today, that connection is shattered.

"I blame a lot of it on absentee landlords who split up those homes when families moved out, and all (these landlords) are looking for is money," Fahey said. He said the fundamental issue is a lack of respect, but not "respect" in the way it's seen today on the street, almost as a threat or a demand.

To Fahey, the "respect" he learned as a child was an acknowledgement of the shared humanity that you offered to your parents, or to storekeepers, or to elderly neighbors, and it was strong enough to bind together a community.

Now? Fahey is still drawn back to Knaul Street, even though his family moved away decades ago. While he grieves at the idea of young people dying in a yard where he once played, that grief underlines why thousands Central New Yorkers cannot fully divorce themselves from their old city neighborhoods.